Ben Birch

Ben is Senior UI Engineer and Beer Baron at Aconex in Melbourne. About 5 years ago a revelation turned him from back end programming to concentrate full time on client side development. At Aconex he brought the rigours of testing to javascript and css well before it was easy and along the way built a lightweight UI framework. The same framework now drives jQuery Mobile using pure javascript.

By day he builds enterprise tablet apps on PhoneGap and by night he contributes to several open source projects and changes nappies. He is slightly over excited by all the awesome technology and rapid pace of change in the web space and it’s open and collaborative buzz.

Ben has a wife, two small kids and hangs out at #melbjs and on GitHub.

Greg Rewis

Greg Rewis is the Principal Evangelist for Adobe Systems, focusing on Adobe’s open web products and technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. With over 20 years of computer industry experience, Greg spends in excess of 200 days of the year on the road, talking with customers, giving product demonstrations at seminars, and speaking at industry conferences.

Greg has been passionate about the web since putting his first “home page” online in 1994. His career has taken him around the world, from the early days of desktop publishing, to a start-up in Hamburg, Germany, the glory days of the web at Macromedia and finally his current role at Adobe.

The original GoLive Cyberstudio Product Manager and former Dreamweaver Technical Product Manager, Greg is the co-author of “Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3″ and “Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4″ published by New Riders, as well as a regular contributor to industry publications.

Anne Galloway

Dr Anne Galloway is Deputy Head, School of Architecture and Senior Lecturer, School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington. Anne is fascinated by the role of new technologies in everyday life, and tries to find ways for the social sciences and design to work together to better understand material, visual and discursive culture. As Principal Investigator at Design Culture Lab (www. design culturelab.org) she works with farmers, industry and government to imagine possible technological and social futures for the production and consumption of “ethical” merino products.

Simon Wright

Simon Wright is the Art Director of news.com.au, leading the design and front-end development team. He’s responsible for the brand’s design and development across all digital platforms, and also works closely with journalists on new ways to tell stories online. As someone who’s passionate about design, the web, media and
well-designed chairs, being a part of a news website’s a near perfect fit (if it was possible to do this while climbing up a rockface, he’d never leave).

In a previous life Simon was based in Perth and wore the many hats of small business, mostly the propeller-topped one of designer/front-end dev and sometimes the dull beige hat of The Guy Who Does The Finance.

Dmitry Baranovskiy

Dmitry has over ten years experience in creating web applications. Having started as a back end developer, more recently he has changed his orientation to front end development and even pure design.

He is the creator of Raphaël, the JavaScript Library that simplifies your work with vector graphics on the web, as well as a Optimus, the Microformats transformer. At any given moment he is always working on three secret projects, though no one knows where he gets the time for any of this.

Damon Oehlman

Damon Oehlman is an experienced web and mobile applications developer. He has worked with small and large companies to develop software solutions for desktop, web and most recently mobile devices. His first technical book, Pro Android Web Apps, was released earlier this year by Apress. Damon currently runs his own software development and consulting firm Sidelab, which specializes in cross-platform mobile solutions. Damon’s aptly titled tech blog Distractable offers a mix of articles, tutorials and other shiny things. He is a proud dad, husband and one day dreams of owning his own underground lair.

Peter Mika

Peter Mika is a researcher and data architect at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, working on the applications of semantic technology to Web search. He received his BS in computer science from Eotvos Lorand University and his MSc and PhD in computer science (summa cum laude) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His interdisciplinary work in social networks and the Semantic Web earned him a Best Paper Award at the 2005 International Semantic Web Conference and a First Prize at the 2004 Semantic Web Challenge. From 2006 to 2009, he has been a co-chair of the Semantic Web Challenge. Mika is the youngest member elected to the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics. He is the author of the book ‘Social Networks and the Semantic Web’ (Springer, 2007). In 2008 he has been selected as one of “AI’s Ten to Watch” by the editorial board of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal. Peter is a regular speaker at conferences.

Nicole Sullivan

Nicole is an evangelist, front-end performance consultant, CSS Ninja, and author. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question: how do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also consulted with Facebook and the W3C, and is the co-creator of Smush.it, an image optimization service in the cloud. She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for large commercial websites.

Aaron Weyenberg

Aaron Weyenberg is the UX Lead at TED in New York. Over the last 13 years Aaron has served in key roles at a range of companies, from small design agencies to fledgling startups to internationally recognized media brands. As an Art Director for ESPN, Aaron guided best practices, developed core UI components and designed pioneering real time game and scoring apps. His work appears in places like Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions and Tripwire Magazine.

His offline hobbies involve learning about social psychology and human behavior, photography, reading, and an intrepid quest to find the perfect iPod earphones.

Rahul Sen

Rahul is an interaction designer with a background in architecture and theatre. He has a MA in Interaction Design from the renowned Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden. Prior to his work at Ergonomidesign, where Rahul currently works, he has worked at Teague (Seattle) and Atlas Copco (Örebro).
In all these places he has worked on a wide range of cross-disciplinary projects with people from different backgrounds. His work has made him work with global brands like Microsoft Surface, Windows Phone, Zune, Hewlett-Packard, Roche, Proctor and Gamble, Pepsico, Spotify, Maquet, Nokia, and several others. Rahul uses his diverse history to probe and create interesting intersections between people, pixels and our physical World.
In addition to his role as a visual interaction designer, Rahul is a keen thinker about future design scenarios and design-fiction. He writes and speaks about this within the design community as often as possible. He has experienced life and work in India, France, Berlin, USA and Sweden where he currently lives.

Alex Young

Alex Young is co-founder of MOB, an R&D lab in Sydney. MOB create apps, multi-device platforms, Augmented Reality and Computer Vision solutions for customers as well as their own products that are used around the world. MOB is active in the AR standards community globally and work with businesses to provide them hands-on experience using emerging technologies to get a look ahead at what the impacts to their organisations and customers will be.

Prior to MOB, Alex spent 10 years heading up UX, Design and Development teams across Interactive TV, Web and Mobile, primarily in Telco-land.

Scott Bryant

Scott Bryant is a Senior Experience Architect working on online and cross platform news media and classifieds, most recently for news.com.au within the User Standards and Innovative Technology Team for News Digital Media. He spends his time working across product, design and technology teams utilising design and research to create engaging user experiences for news media.

His career began as a visual artist before working in university and local government libraries, and finally into new media. He completed two Masters Degrees, in Media Art and Information Studies (while working as a Project Manager, Content Producer and IA).

Upon returning from the US working on the Ask Jeeves innovative search interface he concentrated on User Experience, He continues to lecture casually in information and interaction design at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Lisa Herrod

Lisa is the Director and Principal Consultant at Scenario Seven, an Inclusive Design Consultancy based in Sydney. With 15 years experience on the web, the past 10 years of her work has centred on design research, usability, accessibility and inclusive strategies. Lisa is best known for her role based approach to web accessibility, which has seen the re-categorisation of WCAG checkpoints into a user-centred, practitioner-focused grouping for content developers, visual designers, developers and user experience professionals.

Scenario Seven specialises in creating accessible, inclusive design strategies that integrate holistically with traditional user research practices. This includes anything from requirements gathering to the review of design documentation (functional specs, wireframes & visual designs), user research and WCAG compliance. We design for diversity.

Ryan Seddon

Ryan Seddon is a Senior Front-end Developer from Melbourne Australia who has an unnatural obsession with JavaScript and the many places it runs. He also loves to tinker with any new web technology he can get his hands on and loves diving into specs and code to figure out more.

In his spare time he’s either playing basketball, writing for his blog thecssninja.com or committing code to github.

James Bridle

James Bridle is a publisher, writer and artist based in London, UK. He founded the print-on-demand classics press Bookkake and the e-book-only imprint Artists’ eBooks, and created Bkkeepr, a tool for tracking reading and sharing bookmarks, and Quietube, an accidental anti-censorship proxy for the Middle East. He makes things with words, books and the internet, and writes about what he does at booktwo.org.

Andrew Arch

Andrew Arch works in the Australian Government Information Management Office, part of the Department of Finance and Deregulation. He is part of the Web Accessibility team that developed, and is responsible for overseeing the implementation of, the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy to assist Australian Governments adopt WCAG 2.0. Andrew has a long history with web accessibility. He recently spent time with the World Wide Consortium (W3C) in Europe looking at the overlapping issues of older people and people with disabilities online. Previously he managed the Web Accessibility Consulting team in Vision Australia providing training and evaluation services across the government, private and education sectors. Andrew holds a Bachelor of Agricultural Science and a Ph.D. from La Trobe University.

Hannah Donovan

Hannah Donovan is a Canadian interaction designer living in London. She led design at Last​.fm for five years, and before that worked agency-​​side designing digital campaigns. Since leaving Last​.fm this spring, Hannah’s become an independent product designer focused on ways to make music better on the web. When she’s not busy with new work, Hannah contributes to spacelog.org and plays cello with a real orchestra as well as a comedy orchestra.
Read an interview with Hannah in Desktop Magazine.

Sebastian Chan

Sebastian Chan leads the Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies department at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Beyond the Powerhouse he also helps other organisations internationally strategize and implement cutting edge technologies in the cultural sector. Seb was also a member of the Australian Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce examining ways of improving citizen engagement with government and opening access to public sector information. Seb writes the popular Fresh & New(er) blog in the museum world, and leads a parallel life in electronic music and art as editor-in-chief of Cyclic Defrost Magazine. He likes sticky dessert wines and high grade dark chocolate.

John Allsopp

John is a co-​​founder of the Web Directions conference series, and author of one of the earliest books on Microformats. As a software developer, long standing web development speaker, writer, evangelist and self proclaimed expert, he’s spent the last 15 years working with and developing for the web.

As the head developer of the leading cross platform CSS development tool Style Master, and developer and publisher of renowned training courses and learning resources on CSS and standards based development, and author of the highly regarded “Dao of Web Design” he has been widely recognized as a leader in these fields.

He’s married to Sara, and has three beautiful daughters, Zoe, Scarlett and Juliet.

Gian Wild

Gian has worked in the accessibility industry since 1998 and consulted on the development of the first Level AAA accessible web site in Australia (Disability Information Victoria). She has worked with the Disability Services arm of the Victorian Government for over thirteen years to keep the four iterations of the Disability Services site (Disability Information Victoria, Disability Services, Disability Online and DiVine), Level AAA accessible. She ran the accessibility consultancy PurpleTop from 2000 to 2005 and built the accessibility tool, PurpleCop.

Julio Cesar Ody

Julio has been a full-stack software developer for the 12 years of his career, and during this time he went from being a GNU/Linux and Unix sysadmin, to a VoIP PBX architect, and finally a software developer.

Since moving to Australia from Brazil, he has worked on startups and companies building software and at the same time, stuck his nose as much as he can into the human side of the software equation, understanding developer productivity, how software companies work, and product development.

More recently he grew too interested in design for his own good, and began freelancing under the codename of Awesome By Design, writing a bunch of software which he open sourced on GitHub, giving presentations using his own presentation framework, and building software that not only does the job, but does so in style.

Simon Willison

Simon is a co-founder of Lanyrd, and co-creator of the Django web framework. Prior to diving in to the world of entrepreneurship, Simon built crowdsourcing and database journalism projects for the Guardian newspaper in London. Simon is responsible for all of the server-side code on Lanyrd, unsurprisingly written with Django. He is also obsessed with Zeppelins, and hopes one day to build one.

Andrew Fisher

Andrew Fisher is deeply passionate about technology and is constantly tinkering with and breaking something — whether it’s a new application for mobile computing, building a robot, deploying a cloud or just playing around with web tech. Sometimes he does some real work too and has been involved in developing digital solutions for businesses since the dawn of the web in Australia and Europe for brands like Nintendo, peoplesound, Sony, Mitsubishi, Sportsgirl and the Melbourne Cup.

Andrew is the CTO for JBA Digital, a data agency in Melbourne Australia, where he focuses on creating meaning out of large, changing data sets for clients. Andrew is also the founder of Rocket Melbourne, a startup technology lab exploring physical computing and the Web of Things.

Robert O’Callahan

Robert O’Callahan has been trying to save the world by contributing to Mozilla since 1999. In 2005 he left a career in computer science research at IBM to move back to New Zealand and work full-time for Mozilla, building up an Auckland development office (which is hiring!). He works on the Gecko engine that powers Firefox, focusing on layout, rendering, and media. He manages the video and media team, but prefers coding.

Paris Buttfield-Addison

Paris Buttfield-Addison is a best-selling author (“iPhone and iPad Game Development For Dummies”) and co-founder of Secret Lab, one of Australia’s many amazing app consultancies/studios. Splitting his time between Australia, San Francisco and, starting recently, Sweden, he has worked with groups ranging from startups such as Meebo (one of the web’s fastest growing consumer Internet companies), to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, to world renown animators. You can find him on the web at http://paris.id.au.

Rob Manson

Rob is the Managing Director and co-founder of MOB, an innovative R&D lab based in Sydney. He regularly presents on mobile, AR and future technology developments. He is a co-founder of http://AR-UX.com&http://ARStandards.org and is an invited expert on the W3C’s Points of Interest Working Group. Rob is not just a spectator when it comes to the future of technology, he’s actively working to shape it. And he’s been doing this though building web based startups in Sydney since 1994.

Addy Osmani

Addy Osmani is a popular JavaScript blogger and a UI Developer for AOL based in London, England. He is also a member of the jQuery [Bug Triage/Docs/Front-end] teams where he assists with bugs, documentation and community updates. His free book, ‘Essential JavaScript Design Patterns’ has been downloaded over 200,000 times in the past year and continues to be expanded in his spare time.

For more on Addy’s work, check out his blog AddyOsmani.com for tutorials, his G+ page for his community updates and magazines such as .net for his thoughts and commentaries.

Natalie Downe

Natalie co-founded Lanyrd on her honeymoon with her husband Simon. Before co-founding a startup, she worked as a senior client-side engineer at Clearleft in Brighton, UK. Today, she juggles leading design, client-side engineering and UX on the project with building the company. If Natalie had any time for hobbies, she would enjoy pottery, yoga, writing and flying her kite.

Luke Dearnley

Luke Dearnley is the Web Manager at the Powerhouse Museum where he previously worked as a developer. In his time at the museum he has been involved with improvements to the online collection including the automatic semantic mining of over 75,000 object descriptions using the Reuter’s Open Calais service, automated deployment of images to the Flickr Commons, and construction of the Museum’s collection API. In more recent years he has weathered the rise in workload as the department has begun making mobile Apps as well as websites. Insert witty insight into personal life here.

Mike Kuniavsky

Presenting:

Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people’s relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design consulting firm, and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micro-manufacturer. He is the author of ‘Observing the User Experience,’ a popular textbook of user research methods, and ‘Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design,’ a guide to the user-centered design of digital products.

David Peterson

David Peterson has been pushing at the boundaries of Web development since 1995; that combined with a background in wildlife cinematography brings fresh insight into what can be a geeky sort of space. He has
built a number of high profile sites for the ABC, Australian science groups and many others.

David works as a consultant with PreviousNext and lives way down south in cool Tasmania — regularly breathing on his fingers just to tap away at the keyboard. He is busy building Web apps built with Open Source toolkits utilising Java, PHP, Python, Linked Data and the almighty Drupal. He enjoys exploring deep into the guts of the Semantic Web and Linked Data to discover new connections and visualisations that help empower story tellers.

Jeremy Ashkenas

Jeremy Ashkenas is part of the Interactive News team at the New York Times, as well as the lead developer of DocumentCloud, helping news organizations analyze and publish the primary source documents behind the news. He works on CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Docco, Jammit, and Ruby-Processing, among other opensource projects.

Relly Annett-Baker

Relly Annett-​​Baker lives in a leafy market town with her husband and two small sons. As a result, she eats far too many cakes from Waitrose and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being content strategist and content writer for Supernice Studio, she is employed as live-​​in domestic staff by two cats. She also writes articles and jabbers on about copy to anyone who will listen, creates scrapbooks, and continues to procrastinate over the draft for her book, a guide to creating web content for designers and developers, to be published in Spring 2011 by Five Simple Steps. She better finish this biography before her editor spots she isn’t writing her book again.

Adam Bell

Adam Bell leads the web production team at the Australian War Memorial, where he works with curators and historians to publish the Memorial’s vast archives and collections online. He has a background as an artist, cultural worker, teacher and printmaker and plays in a rock n roll band.

Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis

Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis is the founder of W3Conversion, a web design company with a passion for web standards. A front-end developer, Stephanie created the CSS Starter Layouts in Dreamweaver CS3 and recently updated for DWCS5. Her passion for sharing knowledge has led her to write books and tutorials, pen a bi-monthly column for Web Designer Magazine, train corporate web departments, and speak at numerous conferences. Stephanie is the WaSP liaison to Adobe Systems, working with product managers to ensure the output of its web products continues to move toward today’s web standards. An admitted workaholic who rarely leaves the office, she frequently escapes to talk to the people inside her computer via Twitter. Her hobby, if only she had time? Studying brain function. Her guilty pleasure? Eighties music.

Tom Hughes-Croucher

Tom Hughes-Croucher is the Chief Evangelist at Joyent, sponsors of the Node.js project. Tom mostly spends his days helping companies build really exciting projects with Node and seeing just how far it will scale. Tom is also the author of the O’Reilly book “Up and running with Node.js”. Tom has worked for many well known organizations including Yahoo, NASA and Tesco.

Martin Tomitsch

Martin Tomitsch holds a lectureship at the University of Sydney and works as researcher at the Design Lab, an interdisciplinary research group within the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. He teaches interaction design for the Web, mobile devices, and experimental interfaces. In his research he investigates aspects of designing and evaluating information interfaces in everyday environments. He is particularly interested in using new technologies to create user experiences that merge the digital and the physical. Martin has a background in informatics with a focus on human-computer interaction, which he studied in Vienna, Paris and Stockholm. Before joining the Design Lab, he worked as interface designer in software projects.

Michael Honey

Michael founded Icelab after a career as creative director and later, interactive director in an agency environment. He has fifteen years’ experience in design for screen, print, video and exhibition spaces, and has expertise in writing, programming, direction and post-production. He is an experienced coder, with a particular interest in algorithmic animation and datavisualisation. He is also experienced in the development of diagrammatic animations for cultural, engineering, scientific and architectural clients.

Michael’s interests include architecture, urbanism, and the environment.

Tim Riley

Tim is a partner at Australian design and development studio Icelab, where he builds excellent web and mobile applications using Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Cocoa, and occasionally out of popsicle sticks. On alternate days he runs Decaf Sucks, an online community for coffee reviews, and RentMonkey, which contains the greatest <form> on the Internet.

Tim is an active participant in the Australian web and iOS communities, as a regular speaker at the Sydney Ruby on Rails meetings, organiser of the Canberra Ruby Crew, and part of the Canberra Cocoaheads chapter. Tim loves coffee and hates gluten.

Stephen P Anderson

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He recently published the Mental Notes card deck to help product teams apply psychology to interaction design. Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops to help businesses design fun, playful and effective online experiences. He’s currently writing a book about “seductive interactions” that will be published by New Riders in 2011.

Christopher Giffard

Christopher Giffard is a full stack web developer at the Department of Education, Employment, and Workplace Relations in Canberra. He’s somewhat new to the government, having a career background as a web guy in graphic design and advertising agencies — but hopes to bring a slice of that mad, informal world to the Australian public service.

He gets a kick out of solving problems everybody else avoids, has a soft spot for architecture and design, is particularly interested in electronic music, and the algorithmic generation thereof. His current secret project involves natural language processing… and sarcasm detection.

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About Web Directions

Founded in Australia in 2004, by long time web industry figures Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp, Web Directions conferences bring together the web industry’s leading experts from around the world to educate and … Read more »